Natural language processing – ETO Research Almanac

ETO Research Almanac

Between 2018 and 2023, researchers published roughly

195,000

English-language articles on natural language processing

The global natural language processing literature grew

92%

between 2018 and 2023

Articles on natural language processing made up

11%

of all articles on artificial intelligence

Authors from private companies contributed to

of natural language processing articles

What counts as "natural language processing" research?•How precise are these numbers?•What are the other caveats?

Explore relevant research in the Map of Science

Data last updated January 6, 2025

Vital signs

197,163
natural language processing articles were released between 2018 and 2023 (estd.)
92%
growth in research between 2018 and 2023
11%
of all artificial intelligence articles focused on natural language processing

Citation impact

19
citations for the average natural language processing article
16
citations for the average artificial intelligence article

Countries

18%
of natural language processing articles have American authors
20%
have Chinese authors
18%
have European authors

Country	Articles (2018-2023)	Growth (2018-2023)	Global share	Citations per article
China	39,492	184%	20%	16.7
United States	35,870	61%	18%	44.8
India	16,634	161%	8%	10.6

Top-cited articles

BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding
2018: arXiv. 96,902 citations
Language Models are Few-Shot Learners
2020: arXiv. 34,811 citations
RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach
2019: arXiv. 23,742 citations
Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners
2019. 18,882 citations
Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer
2019: arXiv. 17,846 citations
Deep contextualized word representations
2018: arXiv. 12,819 citations
Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks
2019: arXiv. 11,681 citations
BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension
2019: arXiv. 10,234 citations
Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training
2018. 9,895 citations
Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback
2022: arXiv. 9,807 citations

Research organizations

Top producers of natural language processing research (by article count)

#1 Microsoft (United States)
#2 Chinese Academy of Sciences (China)
#3 Google (United States)

Organization	Articles (2018-2023)	Citations per article	Country
Microsoft	2,102	77.5	United States
Chinese Academy of Sciences	1,824	25.7	China
Google	1,768	226.6	United States

Patents and industry

5%
of natural language processing articles are cited in patents
5%
of artificial intelligence articles are cited in patents
8%
of natural language processing articles had authors from private companies (vs 6% of artificial intelligence articles in general)

Top industry organizations by publication count

Company	Articles (2018-2023)	Citations per article	Country
Microsoft	2,101	77.5	United States
Google	1,768	226.6	United States
Amazon	1,104	35.9	United States

The Research Almanac runs on bibliometric data from Clarivate Web of Science and other sources. Research subject classifications are based on work supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation under Grant No. G-2023-22358. For details on our sourcing, methodology, and limitations, see the tool documentation.